Yes that's a good one but it's funny that a guy (Otwell) took the basic ingredients of another framework, used it in a super-smart way and created sth better. For sure he offered to the world a powerhouse.
I have little experience with Symfony but i remember myself somewhat disappointed while trying to use it (with a Laravel 3 & 4 background already back then). Laravel definitely was the winner so i abandoned it and till now i have never looked back.
It is true Laravel sometimes makes you want to laugh with the simplicity it offers. We can prototype lightning fast. I can really build a RESTful API in a matter of minutes for my AngularJS Single Page Applications with middlewares included, repositories and interfaces for the interactions with the Database, events handlers and a bunch of super cool stuff. Controllers can stay ridiculously thin and yes under the hood that guy uses the basic ingredients of a competitor. How cool is that right?